There are known several methods for producing an optical fiber including one comprising depositing fine glass particles on a periphery of a glass rod as a core by flame hydrolysis of a glass raw material to form a soot, melting the soot to produce a glass preform comprising a core and a cladding and then drawing the glass preform to fabricate an optical fiber.
A method previously proposed by the inventors comprises depositing fine glass particles on a periphery of a pure silica rod as a core by flame hydrolysis and dehydrating and sintering the soot in an atmosphere including a gaseous fluorine-containing compound to add fluorine to the silica glass to produce a glass preform comprising a core and cladding.
The conventional methods, however, have a drawback such that the optical fiber fabricated from the glass preform suffers from influence of light absorption by hydroxyl groups even if all of the core material, its surface layer and the cladding material are thoroughly dehydrated. Thus, it is difficult to produce a single mode optical fiber having low attenuation of light transmission in a wavelength range near a wavelength of 1.3 micrometers, which is close to a wavelength of 1.39 micrometers at which the large absorption peak by the hydrogen groups appear. This may be due to the fact that, in the initial stage of depositing the fine glass particles on the core rod by the flame hydrolysis, the core material is heated by the oxyhydrogen flame and the hydroxyl groups diffuse from the core surface into the core inside.